abstract: Enslaved women on the Maryland Jesuits’ plantation complex from 1717 to 1865 lived within toxic landscapes where environmental hazards, occupational dangers, and interpersonal violence converged. The intersection of religious institutional practices, bureaucracy, and racialized social norms created distinct vulnerabilities for those women who were enslaved by Jesuits. Economic priorities resulted in hazardous conditions and gendered disposability, while racialized household labor norms positioned Black women as acceptable domestic workers in priests’ households, enabling abuse within isolated spaces. Women died from lye exposure in laundry work and contaminated water sources. They endured inadequate provisions, physical punishment, forced displacement, and sexual exploitation due to the arbitrary decisions of both local priests and distant Roman Catholic authorities. By analyzing these environmental, economic, and interpersonal dangers as interconnected toxic hazards rather than discrete conditions, this article demonstrates how slow violence operated cumulatively in spaces of enslavement. This approach recovers experiences largely absent from institutional narratives of Jesuit slaveholding and reveals the systematic nature of harm that shaped enslaved women’s daily lives.
In 1665, surgeon Gysbert van Imbroch passed away in the New Netherland town of Wiltwyck, leaving behind approximately 540 books that had belonged to him and his wife Rachel de la Montagne. It was a multilingual collection of books, many of which were sold within the Wiltwyck community, and it included numerous educational titles designed for the instruction of reading and writing. This article analyzes the Van Imbroch-de la Montagne library as a prism illuminating how the linguistic and textual marketplaces of the Dutch Republic were trans planted to New Netherland. It argues that families, and especially women like Rachel, were crucial agents in the transmission of language skills and textual culture in the colony, and that Rachel was a probably a language teacher in Wiltwyck. By contextualizing the Van Imbroch-de la Montagne library from the perspectives of language history, book history, and edu cational history, this article offers new insights into the linguistic and textual dynamics of seventeenth century New Netherland.
This article examines how late eighteenth and early nineteenth century white, middle class American women authors con structed the trope of educated femininity in their literary works. It argues that these authors played a critical role in shaping cultural norms that framed women's education to enhance domestic roles within a white, patriarchal, and middle class framework. By defining "proper" uses of women's intellect, their texts simultaneously offered a limited pathway for some marginalized women to access respectability-contingent on assim ilation-and reinforced rigid hierarchies based on race, class, and gender. Drawing on feminist literary scholarship and critical whiteness studies, the article analyzes how educated femininity functioned as a conservative ideologeme that contained women's intellectual agency within prescribed social boundaries. It highlights the tensions in these authors' works, reveal ing how education was both a potential tool for empowerment and a mechanism to uphold social order. Offering new readings of foundational novels and short stories written by white women between 1791 and 1853, this study demonstrates that the trope of educated femininity not only celebrated women's intellect but also sustained white middle class norma tivity by linking intellectual worth to racial and class privilege.
This essay places Aphra Behn's 1689 play The Widdow Ranter into conversation with early naturalization laws to train a lens on how the Widdow embodies the dangers that foreign women posed to England's early American settlements. It explores the multiple historical vectors informing Behn's portrayal of the formerly unfree Widdow's rise to power in Jamestown, Virginia. She transforms herself from an unnamed purchase off a ship to the wife of the settlement's governor by rejecting courtly and literary tropes of English romance while controlling the flow of the colonial commodities of tobacco and sugar. The Widdow's fluid identity allows her to slip through the cracks of the stock colonial characters of Restoration satire to mock beliefs that an English character can survive in America by putting the lie to the integrity of Englishness itself.
Written and set during the Haitian Revolution, Leonora Sansay's epistolary novel Secret History (1808) is preoccupied with the Caribbean nighttime. Few scholars, however, have attended to the signif icance of sleep disturbances in the book or the specific meaning of the Caribbean nighttime during the Age of Revolution. This is an important oversight because the novel abounds with nighttime violence, barriers to good sleep, and nocturnal sensoria that suggest ruptures in the colonial Caribbean's political and material hierarchies. Coupling interdisciplinary night studies with ecomaterialist approaches, I argue that Sansay's night time is a distinct material and cultural domain that discomposes and renders contingent the bourgeois Euro American subject at the turn of the nineteenth century. In particular, bedding materials, intoxicating night blooming jasmine, and nocturnal land crabs reorient the American female protagonists' relationships to materiality, time, and the senses. In doing so, these nocturnal ecologies facilitate modes of personhood that unsettle the autonomous subject who is constituted through marriage and property. Finally, the crisis of sleep in the book signals distress over the notion of autonomous personhood, the category of the white human, and the arbitrary criteria by which some bodies garner political recognition while others do not.
In the summer of 1824, a party of Ojibwe warriors near Lake Superior murdered four traders on the shore of Lake Pepin. The aftermath of the murders reveals how Ojibwe ogimaag (leaders), borderlands residents, and impotent federal officials obstructed the implementation of settler colonial justice in the western Great Lakes. Ogimaag around Lake Superior leveraged their doodem (clan) relationships to protect the accused from vindictive federal officials. Precariously balancing competing interests, ogimaag nominally cooperated with federal agents while manipulating kinship connections to mitigate federal demands. Local bureaucrats and settlers upheld well established transcultural practices to mediate federal policy and maintain their livelihoods. Although federal officials depended on Indigenous cooperation, they sabotaged themselves by undervaluing Ojibwe understandings of kinship. Contesting narratives of dependence and assimilation, the aftermath of the Lake Pepin murders demonstrates how power remained in Anishinaabewaki.
This article situates the origins of the Plymouth colony in a global context that encompasses AngloDutch realignment in Europe and around the world and simultaneous ventures in the Indian Ocean and South America. The global milieu that shaped Plymouth emerged during the era of the Twelve Years' Truce (1609-21) between Spain and the United Provinces, which sparked intense jostling among European states for alliances within and beyond Europe as the end of the truce loomed. Changing AngloDutch relations in the global context of the truce pro duced three episodes in 1619 that, considered together, shed new light on why the English left Leiden when and how they did. Buffeted by changes beyond their control that they deplored and dimly comprehended, these English migrants were not religious visionaries but embodiments of col lateral damage who landed in a place inhabited by people likewise enduring challenging transitions. Considering Plymouth's origins in a global frame work suggests new periodizations, new geographic vantage points, and fresh perspectives on the Anglo Wampanoag collision that ensued in North America.
"Luck's Metropolis" shows how the lottery ticket market evolved in New York City between 1790 and 1820. Once an elite pastime associated with the common good, lottery gambling became an activity associated with a lower class vice. This was a consequence of the emergence of corporations, which created new investment opportunities for elites. As a result, lottery entrepreneurs developed new strategies to market tickets to New York's working class. In doing so, they established the first fully functioning financial market in the country. The history of the lottery demonstrates how the emergence of financial capitalism opened new financial opportunities for some, while generating wealth inequality for all. In the face of widening inequality-and with few other outlets for their capital-workingclass New Yorkers turned to lottery gambling in droves.
This article examines the history of women printers in the colonial Caribbean between the 1720s and 1860s in transimperial perspective, focusing on the case studies of Louise Pierrette Guillot (Veuve B & eacute;nard) in Guadeloupe, Elizabeth Cable in St. Kitts, and Margarita Engelbron in Cura & ccedil;ao. It discusses women who worked as printers across these French, British, and Dutch Caribbean colonies, showing that they actively participated in the production of print culture in the region. Family connections often facilitated the entrance of women into the printing profession by allowing them to inherit businesses from deceased husbands, fathers, or brothers. Thereafter, women printers operated as members of a precarious but often influential middling class, managing newspapers that connected local, regional, and global communities and markets. While they faced challenges in operating their printing businesses, women also contributed, like their male counterparts, to the reinforcement of colonial hierarchies. They published government announcements and commercial advertisements, including ads for the sale of enslaved people. Sometimes they were also civil servants of the colonial regime. Thus, the article argues that women printers were fully embedded in the communication mechanisms of colonialism, despite the gendered pressures and social limitations they faced as women.
This essay analyzes the motivations of approximately five hundred free Black Revolutionary soldiers from North Carolina and chal lenges the prevailing notion that their enlistment in Patriot forces was primarily driven by freedom from British tyranny or enslavement. Instead, the article highlights how class and economic factors, such as local taxation, were pivotal in shaping the decisions of free Black individuals during the Revolutionary era. It assesses the involvement of free men of color in colonial political and economic conflicts, including the War of Regulation (1765-71) and the Battle of Wilmington (1781). In essence, this essay explores how political upheaval in the province, the active participation of free Black men in provincial politics, and their engagement in North Carolina's militia throughout the late colonial era influenced their alliances during the Revolutionary War.
Following the devastation of Meskwaki people in the Fox Wars of the mid 1700s, the Sauk and Meskwaki Nations cooperated to establish new territorial strategies along a three hundred mile stretch of the Mississippi from St. Louis to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. This region straddled woodland and prairie landscapes, granted access to plains hunt ing, and allowed the groups to exploit trade relationships with European empires. The large Sauk village of Saukenuk on the Illinois Territory's Rock River was one of the largest in the region, and additional communities stretched along the river above and below it, allowing inhabitants to pro duce ample crops of corn, hunt extensively for food and pelts to supply the fur trade, and mine lead. At the north end of this corridor was Prairie du Chien, a multiethnic trade center that began as a Meskwaki village and maintained some of its Indigenous character throughout the period. Instead of a binary choice between resistance or assimilation, Sauk and Meskwaki carefully chose aspects of colonial culture that best suited the preservation of their sovereignty and way of life. They interacted with settler markets and chose to utilize some species and goods introduced by Europeans while rejecting others. For instance, they utilized horses to hunt bison in Iowa and Missouri, while they also resisted settler cattle east of their settlements in Illinois, demonstrating their understanding of the animals' importance in undergirding settler colonialism. These careful choices led to a new era of success for Sauk and Meskwaki that challenges declensionist narratives. The intrusions of settlers and their cattle became intolerable in the era of Removal, however, and this prompted the Sauk and Meskwaki to reevaluate their geopolitical strategies. Some chose defiance, which led to the Black Hawk War of 1832.
Indenture contracts were commonly used in seventeenth and eighteenth century New England to formalize labor agreements in which servants (primarily youth) were bound to a master's household for a set period. In addition to immigrant servitude, there were many local practices of private indenture in which these forms were written, signed, and stored within households. New Englanders drew on their familiarity with inden ture papers and used them as tools to negotiate their relationships and obligations to one another. This article demonstrates how servants and masters alike developed legal literacies and forged creative strategies to use indenture papers as tools in both legal settings and social arenas. Its analysis also offers a textured view of power relations within early American house holds, revealing some of the strategies that unfree people deployed in negotiating power within local spaces.
This article examines a now forgotten incident when thou sands of counterfeit Mexican copper coins were found aboard a US ship in the port of Veracruz, igniting a diplomatic row between the neighboring republics. The case, which unfolded as tensions mounted between the Mexican government and Anglo American settlers in Texas, raised fears in Mexico that US citizens were working to destabilize Mexico's govern ment. The article contributes to the history of US Mexican relations in the lead up to the Mexican American War by highlighting an event that helped shape official and public opinion in both nations yet took place far from the Texas borderlands. It also contributes to recent scholarship on the history of money, showing that the production and circulation of currency, including petty copper coins, was central to how Mexicans conceived of their nation's sovereignty in the first half of the nineteenth century.
This article addresses how ethnic German translation prac tices, in both their linguistic and cultural dimensions, contributed to the pluralization of Protestant religious culture in colonial Pennsylvania. In doing so, it offers insights into the source and evolution of American reli gious diversity in the eighteenth century. It explores how radical German Pietists, struggling to establish themselves in a voluntary religious land scape, "Americanized" nonconformist religious practices by embracing recent (re)translations of scripture that departed from the Luther Bible and the King James Bible (KJV). The relationship between text and practice consisted of mutual influence and reflected, in important ways, the complex modes of translating scripture from one language into another. Focusing on the practices of baptism and foot washing as exemplars of this process, the essay argues that the Schwarzenau Brethren and the Ephrata Cloister utilized a hermeneutical approach in their disputations that made trans lation a core component of their efforts to reformulate, enact, and justify alternative religious practices. Their appeals to various German language renderings of the Bible substantiated rituals that went against confessional and dissenting orthodoxies in British North America. This study illumi nates the intricate processes of cultural exchange and transatlantic adap tation, revealing how texts not only shaped but were also influenced by the physical and political realities that drove the transformation of early Amer ican Protestantism in the eighteenth century.
This article explores the domestic leisure tours taken by elite New England women in search of sublime and picturesque landscapes from 1790 to 1825. It examines the journals they wrote about their travels in which they recorded their experiences for family members back home. It argues that in reflecting on their travels, these women developed a female sensibility that differed from that of their male counterparts. This was evident in the way that these women drew on their schooling and reading to shape and pull meaning from their experiences, but particularly to frame their observations on the sublime landscapes they encountered. Thus, provides new insights into the development of a specifically feminine appreciation of the American landscape. Importantly, the journals also reveal their authors' continuing engagement with their audience back home, and the centrality of home and family in their writing, even as they wrote of their new experiences. The unpublished travel journals of elite women therefore served a dual purpose: as a means to share their experiences; and as a conduit through which to demonstrate their learning, sensibility, and refinement.
In April 1789, a group of mostly upper class women wel comed George Washington to Trenton with a commemorative ode, a festive arch, and a banner that proclaimed, "The Defender of the Mothers will also Protect their Daughters." Although historians and visual artists have typically interpreted this occasion as a generic celebration of Washington's famed military and political achievements, these women commemorated something more specific-and less widely known. In 1776 and 1777, General Washington had publicly denounced rapes committed by the British and their allies in southern New Jersey and ordered his own troops to show "humanity and tenderness to women and children." In honoring Washington, this ceremony, with its carefully worded banner, referenced women's war experience and the poignantly intimate meaning of Wash ington's status as their "defender" and "protector." Washington and his contemporaries acknowledged the intended meaning of this unique wel come. In the changing political climate of the early Republic, however, historical memory elided the women and their message, making represen tations of the Trenton reception less about them and almost entirely about Washington.
This article considers what a Native version of a "reparative reading" might look like by analyzing the recurrent images of graves in the Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak or Black Hawk (1833). Departing from prevailing critical scholarship concerned with the "authentic voice" in Black Hawk or proving that it cannot exist, I ask what happens when we read the Life positively, using as a model Black Hawk's own description of Sauk peoples approaching the grave sites of their loved ones. I draw parallels between Eve Sedgwick's notion of a "reparative reading" and Black Hawk's own description of Sauk mourners who attend to the grave sites of their dead and keep those sites "in repair." While such reparative practices are impossible by the time of the publication of the Life of Black Hawk-the Sauk having been removed from their land by settler colonialism-they may yet inform how we approach and analyze the nineteenth century Native text. By reading such texts as the Sauk tend to their graves, we might arrive at fruitful analyses of texts which are by nature fragmented, uncertain, or else created out of decrepit conditions.
In the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century, English colonists fought an intense and bloody war against runaway enslaved people and freeborn Maroons in the Jamaican hinterland. The Black resisters challenged English attempts to re-enslave them and to make the island a slave society. The First Maroon War, a conflict that involved disparate groups of Black fighters, gradually intensified in the early eighteenth century and ended with formal peace treaties in 1739 with Maroon cooperation with English settlement plans. The war also resulted in substantial changes to the Jamaican landscape. In this war about slave resistance, English colonists developed plans to build militarized infrastructure in the Jamaican landscape to control the Maroons and to offer launch pads for future assaults against Maroon strongholds. During the war, Maroons forced English colonists to develop a series of new policies that permanently altered the Jamaican landscape. Maroon control of vast tracts of land in Jamaica inhibited English settlement, trade, cultivation, and travel on the island. Thus, in coordination with militia assaults on Maroon towns throughout Jamaica, colonial legislators also ordered the building of roads, forts, and barracks throughout the island’s interior to possess the terrain and change the Jamaican landscape into a militarized environment in which English soldiers and planters could establish a slave society.
This article examines salacious anti-Catholic publications in the eighteenth century. It finds that self-styled “true” stories of lascivious, predatory priests sold very well in the American market. Reveling in stories of sexual misconduct, anti-Catholics used salacious storytelling to argue that the Church was not only a religious and political threat but a poison within society, one that resulted in patriarchs without authority and wives without chastity. Using language designed as much to titillate as to educate, writers relished their villains’ sexual escapades and delighted in their own superiority. Mimicking the bawdy literature of the day, they identified women as sexual and seductive, lingered on bodies and sexual details, and used the language of farce as much as that of monstrosity. Thus, even as eighteenth-century antipopery told familiar stories about popish sexual perversion, it did so by defining Catholic women and the emasculated Catholic patriarch as central problems of popery: figures to be scorned and condemned, not pitied or saved. Such positioning helped shape the distinctive tenor of eighteenth-century antipopery in the Anglophone world as intimate, popular, consumable, virulent, and, simultaneously, perversely entertaining. In doing so, this anti-Catholic literature celebrated emerging values of Protestant women’s sexual modesty at the same time that it immersed readers in a bawdy print culture.
Thomas Paine has long been heralded as a voice of universal egalitarianism. That representation proceeds from wishful misattributions of antislavery writings and concerted misreadings of the existing archive that continue to this day. Building on insights from critical race theory, Black Marxism, settler colonial theory, and Indigenous studies, this article reveals a consistent pattern of white supremacy in Paine’s published writings. It argues that the emerging Republic defined itself as foundationally white against Black and Indigenous others, and that Thomas Paine was instrumental in this process. The article begins by delineating the systematic scholarly misrepresentation of Paine on the subject of race. It then provides a brief overview of his career in a transatlantic eighteenth-century frame, and proceeds to a radically new reading of Common Sense . It culminates with a reinterpretation of the racial ideology of Paine’s archive. A coda considers the significance of this argument in the current conjuncture.
